Pennsylvania Omnibus (31 page)

Flying head first through the far window, Jerry Rios hit
the floor and rolled, and came up shooting, taking down the last two soldiers. 
In the blink of an eye all of the Transport fighters were dead or dying.

Eagles, the unkempt savage, was standing in front of Dawn
and Jed with a bloody knife clutched in his mammoth hand, and when the two
looked up at him he smiled. There was a huge wad of tobac in his mouth, and
saliva—mixed liberally with greenish particles and pieces of glass—was in his
beard. He was the most beautiful thing that Jed had ever seen, other than
Dawn.

Spittle flew from Eagles’s
mouth as he shouted triumphantly. “Goa Eeguls saving the Amish boy and girl!”
He lifted his hands into the air dramatically. “Ta-daa!”

NOW

Jed rocked back and forth beneath
the wide blue sky. He was lying on his back, a green soldier’s blanket laid
over his chest, as he was carried on a stretcher held aloft by four men. He saw
the beautiful wispy clouds, some connected by gossamer threads of vapor and
others seemingly more solid, like great billowy ships adrift in a heavenly sea,
and he felt the rhythm of the swaying as the men walked. He had a headache,
there was no denying that, and he could hear the people who traveled with him
talking as the group moved.

“The only portal left is up on
the Shelf, and now with the AZ gone, it’s our only hope.” It was Pook Rayburn
talking, and Jed smiled when he recognized the voice. He’d grown to like Pook
while working with him on the farm over this past week. He closed his eyes and
focused his attention on the voices, hoping that by doing so maybe the headache
would fade.

“It’s a long haul, but we’ll
make it.” This time it was Dawn Beachy speaking. “We don’t really have any
other choice.”

“I hope he’s going to be able
to walk at least part of the way,” a third voice said.

There was a loud, derisive
sound as one of the men snorted aloud and then spat. “Boy being hurting,” that
deep and easily identifiable voice scolded. “Eeguls and boys carrying he all
everywhere if needing be.”

“I understand, Eagles,” the
third voice said.
Ducky
, Jed thought.
I know his voice and his
tendency to worry.
“And I’m not complaining,” Ducky added. “Besides, as
short as I am I’m not really carrying any of Jed’s weight at all. I’m just
saying it would be nice if he improves and he can walk part of the way.”

“He’s had a major head injury,”
Dawn said. “Angelo and I had to do four hours of surgery just to get all the
shrapnel from his shattered BICE out of him… all so no little piece would get
into his bloodstream or work its way around so that it cut something
important.”

“He’s lucky to be alive after
that fall,” Pook added.

“Okay!” Ducky said with a sigh.
“Just so everyone knows: I’m not complaining about us having to carry Jed. Not
at all.”

“We all want him to improve and
get better, Ducky,” Dawn said.

“That’s all I was saying,”
Ducky said.

Jed opened his eyes again and
stared into the sky. So beautiful. The headache blurred a little around the
edges, and he concentrated on breathing deeply, tried to focus his attention on
where he was and what might be happening. So: his BICE was gone. Shattered in a
fall. That was one thing. He tried to access it, as if he believed that what
he’d just heard wasn’t true. He concentrated and imagined his BICE control
panel coming up, but however much he focused, nothing happened.

He watched the clouds again as
they moved, and then closed his eyes and took several very deep breaths. He
tried to let all of the tension go out of his body, noting that as he did so,
the headache seemed to lessen just a bit. Then he opened his eyes again. He
imagined the sky and the clouds as being made of tiny pixels, and he tried to
soar up there so he could get a closer look. Nothing happened, so he settled
himself again. To be without the BICE interface now… it seemed like trying to
think or operate without part of his own mind. Surely all of his new powers
hadn’t been stripped from him?

He tried to remember everything
he’d been told about how the brain worked. He evened out his breathing again,
and this time he
really
concentrated. He imagined the new synapses that
had been formed when the BICE was first installed, and he tried to think of
them as little switches that could be flipped on and off at will. He once again
pictured himself bringing up his BICE control interface. And this time,
something spectacular happened.

Darkness permeated his mind,
and in moments the white screen appeared before him. He immediately reacted by
dividing the screen into nine windows, just as he’d done the last time he’d
used his BICE.

Next, he imagined himself
dividing his mind
—
his
own consciousness
—
so
that a whole new Jed was operating each screen, and simultaneously all nine of
the windows came to life, each monitor showing him different data.

Now he was faced with a whole
new reality. What was happening to him? He could feel the sway of the
stretcher, and the cool breeze on his face. He could still faintly hear the
voices of his friends as they carried him along. But in his mind, he was
looking up at nine view screens, like nine panes of glass in a window. He
looked closely at the bottom right-hand pane, and on that ninth video screen
the image of the coffee can appeared.

Either he was suffering from
brain damage and he was now hallucinating that his BICE was still functioning,
or…
could it be?
Could his brain have been permanently altered by the
presence of his BICE? He remembered back to the early days, when he was just
studying about the BICE and how it worked. He remembered someone… maybe it was
Dawn… telling him about experiments that had been done on the brain in the
past. In one such experiment, soldiers were given goggles that inverted their
vision, and therefore the world that they saw. Since the lenses naturally
inverted every bit of light that enters the eyes, the brain had the job of
flipping the upside-down images into a right-side-up picture. With the
inversion goggles on, everything looked upside-down. The soldiers’ feet touched
the ground above their eyes, and the sky hovered below. A tool lying on the
ground would appear to be “up,” but if they tilted their head up to look at it,
their view would pan in the opposite direction—toward the sky. Which was
“down.”

In short, the goggles were very
disorienting, and at first, the soldiers often got very sick. Doing the
simplest tasks became extremely difficult. But then a strange thing happened.
After several days of wearing the goggles non-stop, their brains eventually
began to
re
-invert the images. The brain was able to
correct
for
the inversion goggles, by turning the images back over so that the men began to
see things right-side-up again. Their brains had re-trained themselves.

Then the goggles were
removed—and the brain, having grown accustomed to inverting upside-down visual
inputs, continued to invert the images. As a result, the men once again had the
feeling that everything was upside down, even though they weren’t wearing the
goggles. Fortunately, within a few days their brains had
re
-re-trained
themselves, and everyone’s vision had returned to normal.

Overall, it was a fascinating
lesson in how the brain can learn to function and adapt to alterations to its
normal input.

Jed’s brain (it seemed) had
learned to work as if the BICE was still there, providing him visual input so
that the newer, higher-functioning areas of his mind could interpret data. On
one screen, an image was displayed. It showed a large empty area, devoid of
hills or valleys, where the Amish Zone should have been. It was as if the whole
community had just disappeared. He didn’t know how he knew that this had once
been where the Amish Zone was, but he did. Even the immense walls were
completely gone. On another screen he was seeing the process of okcillium being
extracted from reclaimed road base, back in the old world. On still another
screen, he examined maps and data that appeared to show a location up on the
Great Shelf. All of these things—except for the image of the empty space where
the Amish Zone had been—were things his brain already knew. His mind was simply
using a new process for interpreting and organizing data, having learned this
method from working with the BICE.

The other screens showed things
like force readiness reports, and files about the history of the AZ and the
building of the wall. All things he’d read before. He thought of Dawn Beachy,
and a file containing her picture appeared on one of the screens. He scrolled
to an overall summary of the information Transport had about her. He had the
feeling that, if he’d ever looked at or studied a piece of information before
in all of his life, he now had access to it in real time.

This was all impossible, of
course. If he had no BICE interface, he couldn’t be accessing the Internet.
Maybe he was just having hallucinations. Maybe his brain was somehow responding
to the injury, and as a result he was flashing back to an earlier episode in
his bizarre experience.

He felt a drowsiness coming
over him then, and he breathed deeply again. He heard voices: those of his
friends as they carried him along on the stretcher. And there were other
voices, too. The voices of strangers he’d never met.

He squeezed his eyes tightly,
and he saw the screens in his mind, and they’d gone dark.

Ask questions.

He thought for a moment.
What
is the next step?
 
Where do we go from here?

And the screens answered
him.

ONE WEEK
EARLIER: SUNDAY

In his sleep, Jed
soared high above the Amish Zone and looked down on it from the air. Down
below, his body was ostensibly sleeping, cramped but not too uncomfortable, on
the floor of Matthias’s kitchen, along with Pook, Billy, and Ducky.

At altitude,
he took it all in. He could see the entire extent of the Amish Zone, and the
incredibly high and thick walls that surrounded it. Looking closer, he
discovered that the walls appeared to have been constructed of rubble, pushed
into the form of perimeter walls. But the top of the wall and the inside—facing
the Amish countryside—had been finished and smoothed with concrete. Stairs and
railings had been added here and there, so that anyone from inside the Zone
could scale to the top if they felt like it.

Jed still
didn’t have answers about who had first built the walls… or why. The barrier
had not been built to keep the community safe from animal predators, this much
he knew. He studied the walls a while longer, then shifted his perspective so
that he could see the whole community in one scene—and found himself deeply
moved by the awesomeness of it all. This plain community, connected by blood
and heritage to the old world of before, and even to the still-older world of
medieval Europe, had survived and thrived—while the largest empires ever built
by humans had all come and gone.

Although it
was night, Jed could still see every detail, and he adjusted the light until it
was perfect for his purposes. He could see the rich soil, the tree-lined lanes,
the perfect intersecting lines of plowed fields and fences. He could see the
immaculate houses and yards and barns set in stark relief against the verdant
nature the community revered and managed. He saw a people who’d determined that
they would define
themselves
rather than have their reality and culture
defined by the times. That thought satisfied Jed, and soothed his soul.